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In today's competitive health care environment, physician engagement is a top strategy for increasing referrals and market share. As a relatively new regional health system, Trinity Health of New England needed to go beyond mere engagement to align employed and community-based physicians with organizational priorities for a shared mission, clinical integration and revenue growth.

Several years ago, the Betty Ford Center for chemical dependency and recovery merged with Hazelden, a provider of drug and alcohol addiction treatment, to create the Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation, the largest nonprofit of its kind in the nation. Here is an inside look at some of the key decisions and processes involved in this challenging initiative and eight key takeaways to inform your rebranding efforts.

Ask the executive team at any of the 5,200 hospitals in the United States and they will likely tell you that local demographics, competition, and payer mix make them "different from the rest." Although differences abound, all are seeing troubling reimbursement trends, all must find ways to respond to an increasingly demanding consumer, and all are looking to develop a revenue growth strategy for long-term sustainability.

In 2013, Boston Medical Center (BMC) began a five-year strategy to recruit more than 45 additional general internal medicine and family medicine providers. Read more about their recruitment campaign in this article.

Imagine trying to manage strategic planning for a health system that has doubled in size in recent years, but lacks standardized business development processes to maximize growth opportunities. Then, imagine an extremely competitive consumer marketplace where two members of that same network are advertising for the same service in the same newspaper (or on dueling billboards) with no mention of the health system.

In today's increasingly vertically, horizontally, and virtually integrated healthcare landscape, a service line focus on core diseases and conditions can be an effective strategy for managing patient care and boosting market share. But while clinical service lines - from cardiology to orthopedics to neurosciences - have gained considerable traction elsewhere in healthcare, they are much less common in children's hospitals. This is unfortunate because, like other health systems, children's hospitals are increasingly focused on providing care outside the hospital itself.

As healthcare strategists, we may also long for a similar scorecard to help us turn potential opportunities into real winners. The hospital leadership at AAMC teamed up to pinpoint gaps in services as well as the missing pros—the physician specialists and other clinicians—that might help grow patient volume and meet the healthcare needs of the community they serve.

A retail health initiative calls for careful planning. Here are five keys to a successful retail strategy.

"Leakage" is a buzzword today, especially for physician relations professionals and healthcare strategists as they prepare for the future of network referral management. Simply defined, leakage is what happens when primary care physicians send their patients to out-of-system providers rather than to those within your organization's network.

The emergency department (ED) is often considered to be the hospital's "front door." For this reason, healthcare strategists have historically focused their attention—and marketing dollars—on driving ED volume, which subsequently drives inpatient admissions, surgical procedures, diagnostic testing, contribution margin, and net revenue.

Learn how Lafayette General Health developed and deployed a partnership ranking decision tool to support its long-range strategic business objectives.

Find out why the value-based purchasing score is getting harder to predict and why HCAHPS is important to track.